Books & Translations
“A well-informed, clear and attractively written introduction to the work of a difficult but important poet.” –Times Literary Supplement
“Artfully translated from Russian by poet and scholar Sarah Valentine.”
Finalist for the American Literary Translators Association’s National Translation Award
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After grad school, research fellowships let me stretch my interdisciplinary muscles. At Princeton’s Center for the Study of Religion, I contributed a paper on cognitive poetics to a Templeton Foundation–funded Cognitive and Textual Methods seminar featuring mostly sociologists (and me).
As an Andrew C. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at UCLA, I joined scholars from across the humanities for the Cultures in Transnational Perspective program. My theories on Second-World postcolonialism and Russophonie inspired a few dissertations in the Slavic department and led me to research African postcolonial novels in Russian translation. Were anyone so inclined, they could find these papers and more on JSTOR.
I turned back to my graduate work to write Witness and Transformation, which proved to be the first full-length study on the Chuvash poet Gennady Aygi. His elegiac poems have inspired artists, composers, and poets around the world. You can read more about him here.
Recently, I have turned to crime. In 2020-2021 I attended Antioch University’s low-residency MFA program as a fiction writer. There I began my passion project, a Victorian-era murder mystery series featuring the sassy coroner and detective Ivy Marwood. You can read an excerpt from Ivy’s adventures here. I keep up with all things murder and mayhem as a member of the international organization for writers, Sisters in Crime